Cat Scare, Part 2
In this episode it’s revealed that the cat survived the apartment bombing, but that more targeted and coordinated crimes are happening all over. Echika even gets attacked after switching hotels. Something her attacker says, though, warns her (and Harold, who was there for reason not announced yet) that there might be a bomb at the central office.
They race back, realize the bomb must be in the electrical room based on E’s motives, and go there to find that the bomb is the cat. I’m not sure if the cat was swapped with a robot bomb cat or just harnessed with a bomb, but either way it ambles towards them and goes off.
Echika quickly starts getting smoke inhalation issues, and the door to the escape stairs is blocked. She tries to shoot out the hinge so the door can be battered down, but in case you forgot that Echika sucks, she falters and resorts to giving a scattered confession to Harold about character growth we never saw the baseline for, and then passes out from the smoke and carbon monoxide before she can actually squeeze the trigger.
Harold picks up the gun and shoots out the hinge. This is, evidently, a violation of the Laws of Respect for him to even hold a gun (as he explains later when lying about doing it). This gets Echika out and despite her and Harold failing at everything, the cavalry evidently prevented E’s minions, who laid siege to the building with the power out, from accessing the archives and… I don’t know, physically stealing the servers with the data they want? They weren’t going to hack much without power in the building.
In the aftermath, we get a long Echika/Harold talk that basically sets them up as a couple, and reveals that E must be an AI with similar specs to Harold. They also reveal that, in what is hopefully a shock to nobody, there must be an insider minion. And Harold knows who it is. Now, they don’t say who the spy is, but given that we’ve got this new girl who has to burn for plot purposes, who has mysteriously increasing abilities, and who has serious hangups about the same old case that E is going on about and targeting… yeah, I will be absolutely shocked if it’s not her. Despite being almost suspiciously pleasant and seemingly dedicated, her very existence was red flags from her introduction on.
Speaking of things that viewers who have seen a show before should probably have solved first, the last little bit of the episode reveals that the cartridges Echika got from Bigga for managing her PTSD were, in fact, the cause of her decreased abilities – due to a little extra hacking from Bigga’s dad and not because they’re digital drugs, but still, it’s almost like when a detail is introduced in a show that doesn’t really do much in the way of extraneous details, it’s probably relevant to whatever is at hand. With dad having confessed, Bigga is readying a counter-cartridge that will restore Echika’s Cyber-Inspector capacity, which will probably be needed to take down the new girl and E.
That will presumably happen next week, seeing as Your Forma seems to be following the tried and true formula of 4 episodes to a Light Novel that a lot of adaptations do.
Honestly, obvious twists aside, which can be excused somewhat as it is clearly meant for Fair Play in the mystery department, the show is looking up… ish. There are still a lot of talks predicated on the characters having come from a place that I wish we saw, in a way that makes me think we should have seen it, but the sum of the production is angling towards tolerable. Let’s see how it holds up.